Build from source

Compiling from source is probably the most effective way of installing Octave on your system. To do this you will require compilers for the following languages:

C

C++ (ISO)

Fortran

The best supported compilers for the job are the GNU Compiler Collection. You will require at least GCC 4.3 or later, although GCC 4.4 or later is recommended.

To compile Octave, you will also need a recent version of GNU Make. You must have GNU Make to compile octave. Octave's Makefiles use features of GNU Make that are not present in other versions of make. GNU Make is very portable and easy to install.

Download

The download page also contains instructions to download the development sources. If you are using the development sources, be sure to type the following command before configuring:

./autogen.sh

This builds the configure scripts that Octave uses. This requires a number of tools which are not needed if you download an octave release, such as recent versions of autoconf/automake, and tools such as bison, flex, gperf, perl, and maybe others.

Configure

Octave has many configure options. For a complete list, see

./configure --help

If you are building a personal version, you will want to install it into your home directory, or perhaps a subdirectory. Add the following to your configure line:

--prefix=$HOME/octave

Be sure the $HOME/octave/bin is on your path, or symlink the binaries therein to $HOME/bin.

Troubleshooting

1. If you just type ./configure, you may get this error:

configure: WARNING: in order to build octave, you must have a compatible
configure: WARNING: Fortran compiler or f2c installed and in your path.
configure: error: See the file INSTALL for more information.

This means that you don't have a fortran compiler on your system. You can either install a fortran compiler or re-install gcc with its optional build-in fortran compiler g77. To do this you must download the g77 components of gcc before you build gcc. Alternatively there are various f2c programs you could install which convert fortran to C.

2. If you get this warning:

configure: WARNING: "FTGL headers not found. Native renderer will not have on-screen text"
configure: WARNING:
configure: WARNING: I didn't find the necessary libraries to compile native
configure: WARNING: graphics. It isn't necessary to have native graphics
configure: WARNING: but you will have to use gnuplot or you won't be able
configure: WARNING: to use any of Octave's plotting commands

If it fails, then your compiler needs to be set-up differently (how?). On my machine I can compile that test program but still get the error making Octave -- how do we solve this? It has something to do with the shared C++ library versions, check for /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6 and make sure the right version of that library is being used by gcc -- especially if you had to reinstall gcc to build the fortran support. If it still doesn't work, consider installing from the RPMs instead of compiling from source.

Test

To run all tests, change to the octave directory and type

make check

This requires dejagnu.

To run a specific set of tests, change to the directory test/octave.test/<part> and type